Sitter in Chief

Barack Obama and the infantilization of America.

By

James Taranto

October 26, 2011

Breaking from the great American journalistic tradition of speaking truth to power, the San Francisco Chronicle publishes this cutesy puff piece on the most powerful man in the world: "President Obama spent only a few hours in San Francisco on Tuesday, but he took just seconds to prove once again why he's the baby whisperer." It seems that when the president arrived at the airport, he "spotted 6-month-old Josie Knight, who was crying while being held by her mother, Gina Odom, 37, of Oakland."

Obama heroically took "the squalling infant into his arms" and repeated, "It's OK," until she calmed down. "Obama bounced gently and held her for about 10 seconds before flashing a smile and returning her to Odom."

But this isn't just a harmless human-interest story about a baby-kissing pol. It's a metaphor.

Here's ABC News, reporting on the speech the president gave in Fog City: "At a million-dollar San Francisco fundraiser today, President Obama warned his recession-battered supporters that if he loses the 2012 election it could herald a new, painful era of self-reliance in America."

Oh no! Horror of horrors! Obama is the only thing standing between us and having to rely on ourselves! And do you know what they call people who rely on themselves?

Adults.

ENLARGE

Oddly, the White House website doesn't have the text of this speech, but here's a passage from ABC: "The one thing that we absolutely know for sure is that if we don't work even harder than we did in 2008, then we're going to have a government that tells the American people, 'you are on your own. If you get sick, you're on your own. If you can't afford college, you're on your own. If you don't like that some corporation is polluting your air or the air that your child breathes, then you're on your own.' That's not the America I believe in. It's not the America you believe in."

Obama explicitly rejects the American ethos of self-reliance. He sees dependence on government not as an evil, if sometimes a necessary one, but as a goal to be pursued. It reminded us of Peggy Noonan's observation last week that there's something not fully adult about the president himself: "Sorry to do archetypes, but a nation in trouble probably wants a fatherly, or motherly, figure at the top. What America has right now is a bright, lost older brother. It misses Dad."

Perhaps Obama is eager to infantilize Americans precisely because he is not a fatherly figure--a man of unquestioned wisdom and maturity. A strong father continues to command his children's respect even as they too reach adulthood. As Mark Twain observed, "When I was a boy of 14, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be 21, I was astonished at how much the old man had learned in seven years." The "bright, lost older brother," by contrast, can command the respect only of young children.

Fox News, meanwhile, reports on an effort to push nanny-statism even further: "Gov. Dan Malloy has declared Thursday 'Diaper Need Awareness Day' as part of a campaign by The Nutmeg State to pressure Washington into providing free diapers to low-income families." Rep. Rosa DeLauro, like Malloy a Connecticut Democrat, is pushing legislation that "would allow Uncle Sam to . . . provide funding for diapers and diaper supplies."

Maybe Obama should take it one step further and ask Congress to create a new cabinet-level Department of Infant Care to provide free diapers to all Americans. (Would that include the elderly? Depends.) It would certainly resonate with his 2008 campaign theme of "change."

Remedial Writing It looks as though the Worst Writer in the English Language is making an attempt at self-improvement. Here are the first two sentences of his column today:

Who would have predicted it? Barack Obama has turned out to be so much more adept at implementing George W. Bush's foreign policy than Bush was, but he is less adept at implementing his own.

This leads very similarly to our Friday column: "Who'd have thought Barack Obama would end up killing more Arab tyrants and terrorists in just the past two years than George W. Bush did in three?" A lesser man would take offense at the imitation, but we are happy to be helping make him a better writer.

Along the way, he makes this observation about Obama: "True, he was naïve about how much his star power, or that of his secretary of state, would get others to swoon in behind us." And if this story in the Washington Times is any indication, he still is:

The State Department has bought more than $70,000 worth of books authored by President Obama, sending out copies as Christmas gratuities and stocking "key libraries" around the world with "Dreams From My Father" more than a decade after its release.

The U.S. Embassy in Egypt, for instance, spent $28,636 in August 2009 for copies of Mr. Obama's best-selling 1995 memoir. Six weeks earlier, the embassy had placed another order for the same book for more than $9,000, federal purchasing records show.

About the same time, halfway around the world, the U.S. Embassy in South Korea had the same idea and spent more than $6,000 for copies of "Dreams From My Father."

A caveat: No figure is given for North Korea. If it turns out that more copies went to Pyongyang than Seoul, then the administration's diplomacy may be smarter than the story would suggest.

As for Thomas Friedman, by the end of his column, unfortunately, he has reverted to form. We'll quote the last paragraph, but you might want to pop a Dramamine before reading it:

So, Mama, tell your children not to grow up to be secretary of state or a foreign policy president--not until others have done more nation-building abroad and we've done more nation-building at home.

But listen, Rome wasn't built in a day. With a few more years of determined practice, maybe Friedman will be able to write a column that is better than awful from beginning to end.

Mr. Obama compared the GOP nominating contest to the reality TV show "Survivor." "I'm going to wait until everybody is voted off the island," he said to applause. "Once they narrow it down to one or two, I'll start paying attention."

We suppose people who haven't been paying attention to Obama may believe that he hasn't been paying attention to the Republicans, but in fact he has. Here are some recent headlines:

It reminds us a bit of the New York Times's bizarre denial that it endorsed John McCain in the 2008 Republican primary. And speaking of the Times, our item yesterday on columnist David Brooks prompted a hilarious reply from reader Greg Schwinghammer--which we should warn you contains a movie spoiler:

"Primal Fear" was a silly thriller in which Edward Norton is arrested for a murder, and is a babbling mentally impaired child named Aaron. After talking with Richard Gere, his public defender, it appears he has a multiple personality disorder, and "Roy" is a terrible killer. Lots of repressed memory business and at trial Gere dramatically convinces "Roy" to come out and show himself which leads to the acquittal of "Aaron."

Then at the end "Roy" is talking to Richard Gere, laughing and saying "You were great. That was perfect. We pulled it off." Gere is upset and screaming for "Aaron" to come out, and says something like, "Aaron, I know you are in there. Come talk to me." Edward Norton is then perfectly evil as he looks at Gere and says, "C'mon, man, you're kidding me. You thought that was real. Hey man, there ain't no Aaron."

We'd say Schwinghammer nailed poor Brooks.

Shariahnoia Writing on Commentary's website, Max Boot has a useful corrective to some of the distraught commentary you've probably been hearing of late about the rise of Shariah in North Africa in the wake of the Arab Spring:

Saying a country's legal system will be based on sharia law is about as descriptive as saying it will be based on the Ten Commandants [sic] or the teachings of Christ. Like Christianity, Judaism or any other religion, Islam is subject to countless interpretations. Sharia law has meant many different things in many different countries across the ages. Even Islamic fundamentalists are not all alike. Wahhabis rule in both Saudi Arabia and Bahrain, yet liquor is readily available in the latter but not the former.

Islamist parties do not necessarily take their inspiration from the Taliban, Hamas, or the Iranian mullahs. In fact, the failure of all three of those Islamist regimes–in Afghanistan, Gaza and Iran--to deliver economic or social progress has done much to discredit them in the Muslim world. That doesn't mean most Muslims are ready to embrace a strictly secular regime; but then even in Europe, Christian Democratic parties are common, and in the United States many political candidates claim to take their marching orders from the Almighty.

It's also worth noting that a regime can be "strictly secular" and also horrifically oppressive, as Justice Antonin Scalia noted earlier this month in testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee:

I ask [law students], "Why do you think America is such a free country? What is it in our Constitution that makes us what we are?" And I guarantee you that the response I will get--and you will get this from almost any American . . . the answer would be: freedom of speech; freedom of the press; no unreasonable searches and seizures; no quartering of troops in homes . . . those marvelous provisions of the Bill of Rights.

But then I tell them, "If you think a bill of rights is what sets us apart, you're crazy." Every banana republic in the world has a bill of rights. Every president for life has a bill of rights. The bill of rights of the former evil empire, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, was much better than ours. I mean it. Literally, it was much better. We guarantee freedom of speech and of the press. Big deal. They guaranteed freedom of speech, of the press, of street demonstrations and protests, and anyone who is caught trying to suppress criticism of the government will be called to account. Whoa, that is wonderful stuff!

Of course, it's just words on paper, what our Framers would have called a "parchment guarantee."

We are far from confident that the democratic experiment in the Arab world is going to work out well. But if you start telling us that Libya is sure to be worse off than it was under Moammar Gadhafi, merely because he was "secular," we will take you about as seriously as we took people who said the same about Iraq and Saddam Hussein.

Other Than That, the Story Was Accurate "An editorial on Sunday about military detentions misstated the number of senators who voted for a measure that would have stopped federal courts from trying terrorism cases. It was 47, not 42. The editorial also should have said that an almost equally bad measure was produced by Senators Carl Levin and John McCain, not Mr. Levin alone."--correction, New York Times, Oct. 25

Out on a Limb

"2012 Election Will Be a Referendum on Obama, Whether He Likes It or Not"--headline, The New Republic website, Oct. 26

"Look up from this paper right now, men. Take the first object you see and imagine what it would look like if it were rotated. Doesn't that feel great? Now look out your window at the World Trade Center. Give it, say, a 90-degree turn to the left. Piece of cake, right? And that's a 110-story building you're spinning around like a child's top. Do you have any idea what it would cost to actually rotate the World Trade Center?"--Stephen Sherrill and Paul Tough, New York Times, March 3, 1995

"Protesters with Occupy Atlanta marched to the Georgia-Pacific building downtown late Tuesday afternoon in an attempt to levitate the building."--WSB-TV website (Atlanta), Oct. 25, 2011

News of the Tautological "Making history through diplomacy 'depends on making deals with other governments,' says Michael Mandelbaum, the Johns Hopkins University foreign policy expert (and co-author with me on 'That Used to Be Us')."--Thomas Friedman, New York Times, Oct. 26

In Defense of the New York Times The New York Times and the Puffington Host are feuding again. Normally we'd treat this like the Iran-Iraq war and root for both to lose, but in this case we have to support the Times on the merits. Women's Wear Daily fills us in:

Times lawyers fired off a cease-and-desist letter to Arianna Huffington on Monday, claiming that The Huffington Post's new blog, Parentlode, is a rip-off of the Times blog Motherlode and she better change the name or else.

One of the things we most loathe about feminism is its effect on the language. Self-appointed feminist language cops make a pretense of aiming for "gender neutrality," but in fact their aim is to make language ugly and unnatural so that you constantly have to think about their ideology. When the traditional terms are gender-neutral, such as "chairman," they insist on changing them ("chairwoman" or "chair"). Only when the traditional terms are gendered do they want to neutralize them, such as calling actresses "actors."

Now feminists are trying to wreck puns. "Parentlode"? Give us a break. Here's an even worse example: Today we received a press release for a book called "Womenopause: Feeling Fit, Feminine and Fabulous in Four Weeks," whose authors are apparently unaware that the first three letters of "menopause" have nothing to do with men but come from the Greek menos, for "month."

It gets worse. We looked at the book's website and found that there's a chapter called "Manopause: It's Not a Typo." We'd think more highly of the authors and their editors if it were.

The press release tells us that the book "invites readers into the intimate conversation that takes place between a woman and her female gynecologist." Be thankful for small blessings. At least it didn't say "gal-necologist."

This copy is for your personal, non-commercial use only. Distribution and use of this material are governed by our Subscriber Agreement and by copyright law. For non-personal use or to order multiple copies, please contact Dow Jones Reprints at 1-800-843-0008 or visit www.djreprints.com.